Who ruled Carthage?

Carthage stood on a promontory on the eastern shore of the Lake of Tunis, in present-day Tunisia, facing the narrow sea between Africa and Sicily. Founded by Phoenician settlers, it grew into the capital of a trading empire that dominated the western Mediterranean for centuries, until Rome destroyed it in 146 BC. Rebuilt as a Roman city, it became one of the largest towns of the empire, and its ruins now lie within a wealthy suburb of Tunis.

The city's Punic name, Qart-hadasht, means "new city". It was founded by colonists from Tyre, the leading city of Phoenicia, on land that had not been settled before. Ancient writers offered very different foundation dates: Philistos of Syracuse placed it around 1215 BC, while the Sicilian Greek historian Timaeus put it 38 years before the first Olympiad, giving 814 BC, the date most modern historians accept. Legend credits the foundation to a Tyrian queen, Elissa or Dido, who was promised only the ground a single oxhide could cover and cut the hide into strips to mark out a whole city; her historicity is doubted.

By the end of the seventh century BC Carthage had become a leading commercial centre of the western Mediterranean. Unlike most Phoenician and Greek mother cities, it sent its own magistrates to govern its overseas settlements, and by the end of the sixth century it had absorbed older Phoenician colonies such as Utica and controlled much of the North African coast as well as parts of Sicily and Sardinia.

Rivalry with the Greek cities of Sicily produced a long series of wars, including the defeat at Himera in 480 BC. Treaties with Rome, the earliest dated to 509 BC, eventually gave way to the three Punic Wars between 264 and 146 BC. Carthage lost Sicily in the first; in the second Hannibal crossed the Alps and won great victories in Italy, but he was beaten at Zama in 202 BC. In the third, the Roman Republic besieged the city for nearly three years. Scipio Aemilianus took it in 146 BC, the city was burned and razed, and about 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. The often-repeated story that the ground was sown with salt has no ancient evidence behind it.

After a short-lived colony founded by Gaius Gracchus, a new Roman Carthage was laid out on the old site under Julius Caesar and Augustus. By the first century AD it was the second city of the western empire and capital of the province of Africa, a key source of grain for Rome; some estimates put its peak population at around 500,000. It was also a major centre of early Christianity: Tertullian wrote there, and a council held in the city in 397 confirmed the biblical canon for the Western Church.

The Vandals under Gaiseric crossed into Africa in 429 and made Carthage the centre of their kingdom. In 533 the Byzantine general Belisarius entered the city, and under the Byzantine Empire it became the seat of the Exarchate of Africa. Its exarch Heraclius launched the revolt that overthrew the emperor Phocas in the early seventh century.

Arab armies of the Umayyad Caliphate under Hassan ibn al-Nu'man captured Carthage in 695, lost it to a Byzantine fleet, and took it again in 698. Fearing a return of the Byzantines, they tore down the walls, cut the aqueducts and wrecked the harbours, and Tunis grew into the regional centre, partly built from Carthage's stone. A small settlement and a fort survived, and bishops of Carthage are recorded into the eleventh century. During the Eighth Crusade the crusaders seized the fortress and massacred its inhabitants, after which the Hafsid ruler Muhammad I al-Mustansir had its defences demolished.

For centuries the site was little more than a village. The Danish consul Christian Tuxen Falbe surveyed it in the 1830s, and excavations by Charles Ernest Beulé and Alfred Louis Delattre followed. Finds from the 1920s of urns holding the bones of children and animals started a debate, still unresolved, over whether Carthaginians practised child sacrifice. A municipality was created in 1919, and Carthage is now a suburb of Tunis with about 21,000 people (2013 estimate) and the Tunisian presidential palace. The archaeological site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.